Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

I was working in my “office” associated with Dr. Dillon’s lab. It wasn’t really an office, it was desk space in a busy, cluttered shared lab next to his lab. The door on the lab to my “office” was a huge, heavy, solid wood door that seemed to choose to open or close at random. [...]

I finished prepping the arteries, cleaned up the lab a bit, and we went to lunch. Deli sandwiches in Michigan are not as good as they are in New York, but it was a good lunch. I went back to the lab after lunch very happy and ready to get on with the experiments to [...]

Ann came to the physiology lab one day when I was freezing the arteries. She had never seen liquid nitrogen, so I went outside and picked some wildflowers and leafy green ferns to show her how fun research can be. I dipped a bunch of flowers into the liquid nitrogen and when they came out [...]

The rest of the season went fairly well for us too. We had a better than 500 season and won our first game in the playoffs. Our inconsistent play was largely due to scattered attendance of the science people, many of whom had experiments going on at all hours of the day, night and weekend. [...]

Michigan State University has a great sports tradition. It also has a very well organized and large intramural sports program. The intramural slow pitch softball league had over 20 teams and would run all spring into summer. Some of the graduate students in physiology got together to form an intramural coed softball team. There were [...]

Michigan State is a huge university. The laboratories for my research were in two different buildings and they were about a mile apart. When the weather was nice, I would skateboard. One building was in the clinical center, where a lot of the doctors’ offices were, and the other building was the Department of Physiology, [...]

The Ph.D. treadmill is a long and intense ordeal of taking classes, helping teach classes, taking qualifying exams, doing research, proposing a thesis and then defending that thesis. All fairly well established and with clear requirements for continuing on to the next step. However, the need to produce and “’pass” was ever present. Michigan State [...]

Professor Sparks was excited. “Good, we finally have a clear difference of opinion here.” He continued quickly. “Joe, you did not think that the conclusions were supported by the data. What data would you personally want to see to support those conclusions?” I was on the spot and all alone on my opinion, but felt [...]

I was asked, or more precisely, ordered one semester, to do some lectures to the undergraduate physiology class on thermoregulation and thermogeneration in mammals. More simply stated, a series of lectures on how we keep warm. The senior lecturer for the class gave me some outline material and also the types of test questions that [...]

In graduate school I was taking classes with some incredibly bright students. There were two people who were veterinarians studying for Ph.Ds. and an MD/Ph.D. student as well as regular Ph.D. students. All of them were superstars in their undergraduate programs or even in their first doctorate degree. I say all of “them” because I [...]